The Five Things I Do on Sunday to Make My Week Successful

Reactive vs. Proactive

I used to let a lot of things happen to me, including my work week. Meetings would be scheduled at the last minute, I never knew what big projects I had to accomplish, client deliverables never had firm due dates and I basically worked on whatever I felt like.

Obviously, it annoyed my colleagues and clients. Even worse though, was the feeling that I perpetually felt stuck and annoyed at myself for never being able to 'stay on top of it all' and that I was constantly letting people down.

15 years ago I discovered the David Allen book Getting Things Done and I have never looked back. I just finished listening to the audio book again (an annual treat) and it occurred to me finally why people have such a disdain for the method and his writing and some people like me devour the content and feel energised -- it completely caters to folks who are already organised!

The reality is that most people don't enjoy reading about how to get their 'amorphous blobs' of information in a neat system with due dates and recurring tasks and dependencies set as far as 2023. They just want simple, easy to digest tips and tricks to help them find flow and feel positive.

The weeks are blurring into each other more than ever before. Now, more than ever, clearing the decks and hitting the reset button is essential for our sanity, general well-being and productivity. Self-leadership and ownership over your work and career is absolutely crucial.

Luckily for the greater good of the world, not everyone is an anal-retentive productivity geek like myself. So, I thought I would share my Sunday morning ritual in the hopes that it resonates with you and gets you thinking about your own weekly setup routine (or create one if it doesn't exist).

This is the most important hour of my week. I know that everything is going to get captured as part of my system and will get dealt with.

The Golden Rule

It's worth saying that as I go through this process, the one thing I don't do is do anything. Ha! That sounds sort of absurd. What I mean is: I will use the time to work out what I have to do, but I won't actually do any of the work. This exercise is purely to get everything out of my head and queued up for the week to come.

The Tools

• Asana - project and task management - free for up to 15 users in a team for the basic version; some of the features I talk about here are paid
• Office 365 & Gmail - fully cloud-based collaboration tools that include email, contacts, calendaring, file storage and more
• Scannable - iPhone app by Evernote used for taking scans of documents
• LinkedIn

The Setup

Now that I'm a mum and have my first (and only) hit of caffeine between 5 and 6 am, I make myself a nice cup of hot decaf coffee later on in the morning around 10 or so, head into a place where I can close the door (with Dad on duty or bub taking a nap), and turn my phone to airplane mode. To get momentum, I throw in a load of laundry beforehand so that I feel like I've already accomplished something.

It sounds silly, but small completions create a fantastic momentum. If you've ever cleared off a small shelf in the kitchen to wipe off some dribbled soy sauce only to find yourself neatly folding tea towels and dusting the pipes under the sink three hours later you'll know what I'm talking about. And if not, give it a whirl and see how small wins change your energy levels and motivation to move onto the next thing.

The Actions

"Dance, Narwahls, Dance!" I shout at my screen as I tick off things that have been done throughout the week and have forgotten about. Oh, the sweet pleasures in life!

Do a brain dump

The first thing I do is open up Asana in my personal and work Google Chrome instances, at the same time. (Not sure how to set that up? Let me know and I will record a quick video for you.) I take everything out of my desk drawers that has been accumulating during the week (mail, notes written on pieces of paper receipts) and open up my Rocketbook notebook so that I can reference any notes I've taken throughout the week.

The basic premise here is to capture anything you've got physically, written down or in your head into your task list. It's not rocket science. It just has to make sense to you. Short, snappy notes go in one line at a time into your task list, in any order you want:

• buy dog poo bags from Tailz.com.au
• get updated Medicare levy rebate form off of the ATO website
• call Cheryl about her enquiry on the new product offering

It goes without saying that work-related tasks go in the work screen and personal ones go in the other instance. You can definitely join these together and have your personal projects in your work Asana, to keep it all in one place if you want.

As I'm cruising along, I don't organise anything. I resist the urge to start assigning tasks, setting due dates, adding notes into the tasks or doing anything other than just getting the information into the system. Once I go down that rabbit hole I find an hour has gone by and I've just got a mess on my hands. I feel worse than when I started.

So. Just do a dump - get all your ideas out until you find yourself with a 30 second gap where you can't think of anything. Stuff might come up later.

Do an email scan and sort

Even though I am hyper-organised, I do let my mail build up during the week because I am only working part-time and not really in front of the computer as much as I used to be. It occurs to me now that I've had a baby that this is how normal people operate! And it's fine. I've let the idea of inbox zero slide knowing that following my own method is much more efficient and gets the job done.

Basically, I start at the bottom of my inbox and look for emails that, with some perspective now that the work week is over, I can quickly respond to in under a minute. I take about 5-10 minutes to do a quick response and archive those mails that have no further action.

There are going to be a group of emails that do require some next step, and it will take longer than a minute to respond. Using the Asana email forwarding tool, I chuck any emails with follow up actions directly into Asana. I don't pass GO. I don't reword the email to suit the linguistic frame of a task. The most I might do is remove any unwieldy email signatures and then press send.

Scan documents into cloud storage & file my desktop

To give myself a mental break after that bout of decision-making (it's a bit of a drain), I take ten minutes to do something relatively brainless and completion-oriented. Any of the paper mail I need to save (bills, important strata notices), notes I've taken in my notebook from client or team meetings that need to go into a specific storage location, in the old days business cards to be sent off for OCR text recognition and automatic addition into my contacts list.

Using Scannable, I scan in any multi-page and single-page documents as PDF files and receipts as image files, and immediately use the app to email the files to myself. You could also just pop them directly into OneDrive or Google Drive.

From there, I spend a few minutes tidying up the file naming and dropping the notes into the relevant locations. You don't have to do a full on file tidy here - even just getting the files you've got on your desktop and that you've scanned into the right main folders in your storage system (or a folder for that week called "20200809 - To Sort") then you should be good to find it again if necessary.

The amazing thing about Google Drive is that it uses text recognition to read all images and PDF files, so searching is a total breeze. I worry more about work files than personal files and usually just dump personal stuff into my Drive knowing it's very easy to retrieve documents.

You're probably thinking - is ten minutes enough for this? If you go into a backlog, yes. I find myself getting in the groove. If I'm waiting for someone on a Zoom call on a Thursday, for example, I might take 5 minutes to scan a few things then.

It's worth saying that I use a Rocketbook for my notes, which you can wipe off and re-use. I find a lot of pleasure in "washing away" my notes from the week and popping a fresh notebook in my drawer for Monday morning. It's another trigger to me that I'm starting the week off fresh and with the energy I need to tackle big projects.

Review tasks & assign to projects

It's very easy to go down the rabbit hole when you're reviewing tasks. Once I've had a bit of a break I use that extra mental space to review all the tasks that now sit in my in-tray in Asana. When new tasks are added, they sit unorganised on your home screen.

I take a few minutes to go through each task and assign a project to it. Then, I'll usually go through and clean up the task title and description so that it is easier to understand.

For example, if I need to review a document that was attached to an email I forwarded into Asana, the entire body of the email would have come through in the task description.

I usually delete any irrelevant attachments and text, and use this time to purely re-frame the task titles. I'll also add in any sub-tasks that are easy and take less than 30 seconds to do.

I'll also add in any new projects that are required at this time.

Important: In Asana, you can organise your tasks into "Today", "Upcoming" and "Later" and you should always have due dates assigned to your tasks. I don't go through this process in this routine because it gets me too caught up in the details. I keep it very high level here and just think about adding and categorising. It's very tempting to start adding in project details, reorganising due dates and assigning tasks to colleagues. Refrain! (I do assign tasks to my partner in our personal Asana on Sundays but he admits he actually likes it. Colleagues don't always feel the same!)

The only thing I will concede is good practice here is to tick off any tasks you've completed throughout the week, if only to see the dancing narwahls!

Add dates/durations and block out your calendar

The final step in getting set up for the week is putting your big rocks in place.

Our subconscious minds are usually pretty good at this and a few big things will just jump out at you. I recommend heading over to your work calendar and blocking out the time you'll need to complete the hard thinking projects, i.e.:

• Write webinar content for x - 4 hours
• Draft version 1 of report for client x - 5 hours
• Put project updates into Asana - 1 hour

Once you've got your most time-consuming and urgent pieces of work into your calendar, I like to go back and use my last few minutes powering through any of my tasks that don't have due dates and adding them in.

Even if you have to reschedule something, having due dates allows you to have full visibility over your resource planning and allows you to sort tasks by these dates as well. To clarify - I don't use this time to reconfigure everything and do my resource planning and workload management; it is purely to get the data in there so that you can do this as part of your regular weekly work.

The premium versions of Asana also allow you to set custom fields. I like to use this to set the duration of a task so that when I go to start actioning my projects I can make an informed decision about how long things will take.

The celebration

I can hear you now - WOW that's a lot of work to accomplish absolutely nothing at all! Hardy har har.

Here is what I've actually done:

• Emptied out my brain so that I can relax and enjoy the rest of my Sunday
• Done all the low-level processing that is too easy for my revved up Monday morning brain (you want to use that great juice for doing the hard thinking, not the easy stuff)
• Honoured my commitment to myself to service my clients well and collaborate effectively with my teammates (I vow to my team that I will not be a bottleneck to their great work and will support them the best way I can)
• Drastically improved my chances of completing the major and mid-level projects over the next week

I like to celebrate by heading out to Manly beach with my family for a few hours on Sunday afternoons and letting our dog go for a swim (yes, even in winter). Pick something that feels right for you, and enjoy it!

My partner, our 7 month old son and dog (Reef) at our favourite spot!

In conclusion

To blatantly copy Gretchen Rubin: the days working at home are long...but the weeks are short (the years are too). It's very easy to let our weeks control us. Phone calls, messages, emergency Zooms, team huddles - they are all going to pop up inevitably throughout the week. Don't let these interruptions control you.

I'm going to hazard a guess that the folks who take ownership over their own workflow are the new "high performers". Team members who contribute consistently will triumph over those who contribute the most. Adding value through keen insights will take precedent over adding value through output.

Whether you drink the productivity kool aid and go whole hog to create a personal efficiency system is up to you. Probably what's most important is having a system that serves you, and honours your commitments to yourself and others so that you can add value in your workplace and home life.

I hope this has helped you to get a new perspective or some new ideas. Please share your own methods and rituals below. :-)

A bit about me: I'm a digital transformation and productivity geek at RSM Australia. Over the past few years, we've moved our business to the cloud. My role is to take our clients in our 30 offices across Australia on the digital journey, starting with the move to cloud accounting and navigating the abyss that is the app ecosystem in order to unlock key insights in their businesses. I'm looking to connect with like-minded professionals and tech vendors here on LinkedIn.